Hold music

Sorry to stick another sports post in here, but this'll at least be quick. Back during the 2006 World Cup I had a brief discussion with Nemo about why I considered the hold to be the most worthless statistic in sports. I'm not necessarily going to make that exact same case a second time, but I recently saw a box score that made me question how the hold really makes any sense - or at least how it fits with the way scoring is otherwise calculated in baseball.

March 19, Cubs' split-squad vs. A's split-squad. The Cubs lead 2-0 going into the top of the eighth. The following happens:

Kevin Hart comes in to pitch the eighth. He loads the bases on two hits and a walk, then walks in one run to make it 2-1. He is pulled in favor of Carlos Marmol. Marmol walks the first batter he sees to tie the game, then allows an RBI single. The A's eventually win 5-2.

Now, what do you suppose happened?

If you know anything about baseball scoring, you would say, "Okay, Hart takes the loss - the third and winning run was put on base by Hart, so it would be charged to him."

You're right! Hart took the loss. But guess what? He also got a hold! Because the hold, for some reason, is only concerned with whether or not you gave up the hits that scored the runs. So even though the standard rules of baseball charge Hart with the loss (and, slightly less quirkily, Marmol with a blown save), the hold, a more modern stat, apparently isn't concerned with who "earned" the runs, just on whose watch they literally scored. And thus it's possible to get a hold and yet still take a loss. Wha?

I'm sorry: if you put the winning run on base, and then get yanked because you were too ineffective, as evidenced by the fact that you just put the winning run on base, you should not be getting a hold. A hold should be reserved for pitchers who come into the game with their team in position to win and leave without having hurt those chances. I mean, if you come into the game with your team in position to win and you give up the lead, you don't get a save. You get a blown save. Of course Hart, in a very literal sense, left the game with his team in a "position to win," and if Marmol induces a double play on the next pitch we're not having this discussion. But you know how if you come up with the bases loaded and no outs, and you ground into a double play and the guy on third scores, you don't get an RBI? Same deal here. If you come in with a lead, and you put the go-ahead run on base at any point, you don't get a hold unless you get out of that jam yourself. If Hart had walked in that first run, then struck out the next two guys, great; give that man a hold. I know it's kind of a sticky situation - after all, it's not up to Hart when he gets yanked - but I think that's a better solution than giving a hold to a guy who we're admitting was bad enough at his job to get the loss.

Thoughts? Impossibly snarky rejoinders (Nemo)? Desire for me to confine any and all baseball talk to the Cubs blog from here on out?

Curse of the 2 seeds

Aside from last year, it's actually been fairly common for a while that #2 seeds don't fare all that well in the tournament; I think for a few years it was normal for two #2 seeds not to make the second weekend. That's what we had this year as well, and it would have been three if Butler could make a layup.

The question is, have we set ourselves up for a more boring Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight because of this? On paper, for example, UCLA vs. Western Kentucky looks like a blowout. It's funny, though; as Drew pointed out to me earlier, two regions were total chalk (1-2-3-4 in the East, 1-2-3-5 in the South) and two totally blew up (1-3-7-12 in the West, 1-3-10-12 in the Midwest). Frankly, I think that besides UCLA/WKU - and possibly not even that - we're probably looking at decent games for the most part, in all four regions. Stanford/Texas should be great. Louisville/Tennessee oughta be good. UNC/Washington State is going to be really damn interesting considering UNC is averaging 110.5 ppg in the tournament and Wazzu just came off allowing 41 points to one of the highest-scoring teams in the country in Notre Dame. Xavier/West Virginia will probably be pretty good. And I think Davidson is capable of getting to the Elite Eight if they shoot a little better and can get to the line against Wisconsin with anywhere near as much frequency as they did against Georgetown. Kansas/Nova, with all due respect to my huge Nova fan coworker, is liable to be the ugliest game of the Sweet 16 (although given how often Kansas falls on their faces, even that is no lock).

I'm rooting, at this point, for Washington State, Michigan State, Davidson, and Xavier, by region. (I know Xavier is the second-highest remaining seed in their region, but they're the likeliest team among the mid-majors to actually be good enough to make noise in the Final Four, and I'd love to see a mid-major win it all for the first time since 1990.)

Oh, also? Baseball starts in a week. Get ready. And for you Cubs fans, Diary of a Mad Cubs Fan is updating again (and has a few posts in the past few days).

At the horn!

Looks like the basketball gods noticed my complaining from yesterday, because today we had:

* Western Kentucky "upsetting" Drake at the overtime buzzer, a shot good enough that it mitigates the fact that you could easily argue that WKU and Drake weren't as far apart as the seeds (5/12) might indicate. WKU was 27-6, Drake 28-4; WKU beat major conference teams Michigan and Nebraska and lost close games to Gonzaga and Tennessee (both on neutral courts), and their only conference losses were to South Alabama. Drake rolled through its conference at 15-3 and beat both Iowa and Iowa State (the latter in a serious whipping), but was it any more tested? I would argue that the Bulldogs were probably less tested, and though they showed a lot of fight in coming back from a sizable second-half deficit, it's probably not too surprising that they lost, compared to some 5-12 matchups. Also, how about Adam Emmenecker, the MVC player of the year, going 0-for-10 from the floor in this game? Possibly the worst postseason offensive performance by a conference player of the year since Coastal Carolina's Jack Leasure took a dump at midcourt in the 2006 Big South title game. At least Emmenecker had 14 assists and was 11-for-12 from the charity stripe, but just think - if he goes 1-for-10, they probably win in regulation.

* The best upset of the tournament so far, San Diego over UConn in the 4-13 game out West. As with WKU/Drake, this game was played in Tampa, and it was a good one from what I was able to see - San Diego held a slim lead pretty much all game, and they really took it to UConn. When the game went to overtime, I thought it was over, but San Diego never backed down a bit, and that last shot was stone-cold. Kind of funny that San Diego is suddenly the WCC's standard-bearer what with Gonzaga getting shot out of the tournament by Stephen Curry and St. Mary's going down in a heap.

* The most lopsided upset, in my opinion, in history. The only #13 (or lower) seed ever to win a first-round game by more points than Siena's 83-62 romp over Vanderbilt was Navy over LSU by 23 in 1985, the first year that 13 seeds existed. The next year Navy went to the Elite Eight, so it's not clear to me that they should have been a 13 at all that first year; they had a center in David Robinson who was incredibly dominant. Siena did beat Stanford earlier this year, but they also lost by 12 to James Madison (a bad CAA team) and were 0-3 against other teams in the field, including losses to St. Joe's and Cornell and a 102-58 throttling by Memphis. So maybe this was a little unexpected. Siena got 30 points from Kenny Hasbrouck - double his season average - and 19 points from Tay Fisher off the bench, as he went 6-for-6 from three-point range. If they shoot 57% every game - and 88% from the line! - the Saints are going to be a tough out, especially since Villanova isn't a very big team either. Could we see the first MAAC Sweet 16 participant ever?

* The Tampa subregional, possibly the wackiest since unbundling and almost certainly the most interesting since 2001 in Boise. All three of the games I just mentioned? They were played in Tampa. In all four time slots, Tampa had either the best game or the biggest upset, and aside from the Siena game I'd say all of them were probably both.

In fact, outside of the Tampa games, only Davidson's win over Gonzaga was a particularly close or interesting game. Butler/South Alabama, which on paper seemed like it could be a fun one, turned into a blowout, and most of the others looked fairly dull. I guess Mississippi State coming back on Oregon was okay, but then Oregon basically shot their way out of that game. Here's a stat for you - the Ducks were 9-for-38 from long-range. What? At some point don't you just have to stop firing from out there, especially when it's still a close game and you don't need threes? That second half must have been just painful (I only saw a few minutes, and they were, in fact, pretty painful). American gave Tennessee a little scare but ended up losing by 15, and the rest of the games were mostly either tedious, generally unappealing, or both (such as UNC whomping on the Mount).

The Tampa subregional was also the first ever subregional to have all four lower-seeded teams win, which the announcers were touting during the waning moments of Nova's win, although I don't consider that terribly meaningful since until unbundling started in 2002, every subregional would have to have either a 1-16 or 2-15 game. (And even on the four times a #15 did win, you'd also have to have the #14 pull the upset at the same time, which didn't happen for any of them.)

What is somewhat interesting is that this is the first time ever that two regions (in this case, the West and Midwest) have had their 4 and 5 seeds get unceremoniously dumped out of the first round in the same tournament. There have been a handful of 12-13 second round matchups before - most recently Gonzaga and Indiana State in 2001 - but never two in the same tournament. That's pretty cool. It also guarantees us two double-digit seeds in the Sweet 16, remembering of course that last year we had zero.

So as lame as yesterday was, yeah, I'd say today pretty much made up for it. Matchups to watch tomorrow: well, I don't think I'd bother with Kansas-UNLV or UCLA-Texas A&M, but aside from those I think they all have the potential to at least be decent.

Borrrrrring

The NCAA Tournament was amazing in 2006 - #13 Bradley in the Sweet 16, a #14 (Northwestern State) pulling a last-second upset over a #3, and of course George Mason's historic run to the Final Four, the standard against which all future Cinderellas will be measured. As if to make sure no one got too excited, the 2007 tournament poured water over March Madness, bringing it pretty much to a state of dull calm by the second weekend. How boring was it? Well, let's see: the lowest seed in the Sweet 16 was a #7 (the last time no double-digit seed made the second weekend was 1995, for crying out loud! And at least that year made up for it with one of the classic upsets, #14 Old Dominion's three-overtime ousting of #3 Villanova); the Final Four was two one-seeds and two two-seeds, while the Elite Eight was 1-2, 1-2, 1-2, 1-3; only two double-digit seeds even won games (#11s Winthrop and VCU, one win each); and the team that everyone expected to repeat as champions, Florida, did. All that and it's not like the regional final games (or any that came after) were all that good, besides Georgetown/UNC. I mean, if I have to deal with boring seed lines, at least have them play the good games against each other you might expect out of that. But no. Brutal.

Well, this year hasn't started much differently. It's not just the lack of upsets - although the lowest seed to win today was an underseeded #11 Kansas State - it's how one-sided all the games have been. I mean, if you're not going to give me upsets, at least give me shit I can watch. Instead, we got the following:

Xavier by 12
Kansas by 24
Michigan State by 11
Marquette by 8
UNLV by 13
Pitt by 19
Purdue by 11
Stanford by 24
Kansas State by 13
Duke by 1
Washington State by 31
Texas A&M by 5
Notre Dame by 18
Wisconsin by 15
West Virginia by 10
UCLA by 41

Hell, at least half those games were over by halftime. Even some that weren't turned into jokes; Washington State was actually tied at the half with Winthrop, before outscoring the Eagles 42-11 in the second. UCLA held Mississippi Valley State to 29 total points. Kansas, UNLV, Pitt, Stanford, and UCLA all led by 20+ at halftime; Purdue led by 19. Only the Duke game actually came down to the final seconds, when Belmont deprived us of just the fifth 2/15 upset in history thanks to a lousy lob pass underneath their basket (to say nothing of the matador defense they put on Gerald Henderson).

So we only had two seed upsets, one of which barely counts since we all knew K-State was probably not an 11, and the other of which definitely doesn't count since it was 9 over 8 and the 9s win more often anyway. And tomorrow doesn't look much more promising, what with two more 1-16 games and three 2-15 games. That's five right there where you're all but guaranteed not to see an upset (I think it was the 2.7% winning percentage from 1985-2007 that tipped me off). The only serious upset that seems terribly likely is Siena over Vanderbilt, and upsets aren't that fun if you can see them coming. So I guess we can hope for one that we don't see coming (UMBC over Georgetown? Uh, probably not), but I won't hold my breath.

Maybe I should have done a pool this year and just picked full chalk. Not knowing anything wouldn't have made much difference.

Sports sports sports sports

I think I said it once on here already, but for all those who have asked: I will, officially, not be doing a March Madness pool this year, for several reasons. (In brief: the combination of work, school, and having watched basically no college basketball all year.) On the one hand, it's kind of weird not to be doing one; on the other hand, I think it's going to be nice just to be able to enjoy the upsets for once, because I won't have anything riding on the outcomes of games. The last time I didn't make picks for a pool was 2000, and I haven't made no picks since, I think, 1996. Between 1997 and 2000, my picks weren't terribly serious, so, for example, in the 1998 tournament I was mostly able to enjoy the upsets because the picks weren't "ruining" me in any real way. (That said, I can still list off the entire Midwest region for you, since I foolishly picked #5 TCU to emerge only to have them lose to #12 Florida State in Round One. Though I was right not to trust #1 Kansas, since they followed a 110-52 demolition of Prairie View by losing to #8 Rhode Island in Round Two, and #4 Ole Miss, which lost to Bryce Drew and Valpo in Round One, I also failed to trust #3 Stanford, the eventual Final Four team. No, I did not look any of that up, not even the Kansas score. But I digress.)

If this information bums you out at all, just heed the words of Nemo, who rhetorically asked, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, "Where else can I find a competitive tournament picks contest to enter?" There's like one or two out there, I think.

In other sports news, Tiger Woods won again, and the Rockets won again. I'm really curious to see how long each can keep up their respective streaks. I thought Houston might lose today (though I hoped they wouldn't), but they won again. It's hard to believe they could run it as far as 26, what with the next four games being Boston, at New Orleans, at Golden State, and at Phoenix... but who knows? (I realize few of you care about the NBA, but this is a pretty amazing streak. They've gone from fringe playoff team to top seed in the West during this period.)

As for Tiger... the idea that he could ever catch Byron Nelson's record for tournament wins, with the depth of today's fields, is sheer insanity. On the other hand, he's won five in a row on the PGA, and if you include Dubai, he's more than halfway to Nelson's 11. Still, to win six more PGA-eligible tournaments in a row, or seven to break? Hard to believe. He might win next week - Tiger loves Doral - and after that he might not play again until Augusta, where we know he can win. That'd be seven PGA tournaments in a row, but he'd still need five more - percentage-wise, he'd only have a 36-game hitting streak, with DiMaggio still 20 games off. In other words, damn impressive, but also a good deal short of historic. But if anyone can do it... well, that pretty much goes without saying.

Magandang araw po sa inyong lahat.

So as I'm sure many of you already knew, Alma's parents are from the Philippines. As you probably also already knew, I am kind of a geek for languages. I took French for years (and still retain a slight knowledge of it) and tried Russian in college, though I didn't make it beyond a quarter because five days a week at 9 am was just not happening. But I still remember some words from that, even, and I can pronounce printed Cyrillic. I also took a couple linguistics classes in college, and so can converse intelligently on the structures of languages I don't speak a word of. But I never got to actual fluency in another language.

Well, if I don't do it now, it's never going to happen - and there's no language that's quite as available to me at the present time as Tagalog, the primary language of the Philippines. I discovered a podcast and accompanying blog that teach the language in pretty small, manageable chunks - I've gone through the first five lessons so far, which has pretty much just covered greetings and a few "time" words like kahapon, yesterday, and ngayon, right now, the latter of which has proven my most difficult pronunciation challenge so far. (The two main problems that have presented so far are the glottal stop, commonly used at the end of the modifier po, which indicates respect to the addressee, and the phoneme ng, treated as a single letter in Tagalog and a surpassingly unintuitive sound for an Anglophone, since it has an N-like sound but is produced at the other end of the mouth from the English N. English has velar consonants - K, G, and W - but their pronunciations are not so subtle as ng. And we do have the "ng" sound, in words like "ring," but we certainly don't begin words with it, and we pronounce the G in every case I can think of offhand.)

I probably shouldn't weigh you down with all the details ("Too late!!"), but suffice it to say that this should be interesting. I've never had native speakers at my disposal before - although it's kind of interesting because Alma's dad is not a native speaker; his first language is another of the many Filipino dialects, though he is certainly fluent in Tagalog. In that respect it's even more helpful, because he too knows what it's like to learn the language in a fashion other than just picking it up as a baby, although there's a lot less of a leap from Tagalog to other Filipino dialects than there is from Tagalog to English; at least the other dialects are in the same language family as Tagalog. At any rate, he's been a big help so far, and I get the feeling that her parents like that I'm interested in learning the language.

So it'll be a fun experiment, and hopefully more successful than my previous false start (which failed for two reasons - one, I was too embarrassed to use her parents as a resource, and two, the book I had was basically just a phrasebook and didn't break things down in the way that I find useful as a learning tool). I really would like to be fluent eventually, and I suggested to Alma that we could ask her parents to speak nothing but Tagalog around us for a while if I get to the point I'd like to be at, a way of learning by immersion. It might also be good for Alma, who understands Tagalog fairly comprehensively but can't speak it to any significant degree. It'd be pretty neat if eventually we could all sit around, playing mahjong and conversing in Tagalog.

(Oh, and the title of the post, if you're not Alma, means "Good day to you all." With politeness, since my parents read this.)

Good luck moving up, 'cause I'm moving out

So, my roommate got a new job and has decided to move at the end of the current lease, which runs out April 30. Since I'm not really looking to room with anyone else until the day Alma and I finally get to share a bedroom full-time, that means finding a studio somewhere... which means, for the first time in my life, I actually have to go apartment hunting. It's going to be kind of weird. Aside from the house I grew up in in South Orange, I've never lived anywhere as long as I have here:

September 1982 - March 1986: 325 Barberry Rd, Highland Park, IL
March 1986 - September 2000, plus summers of 2001 and 2002: 162 Irving Ave, South Orange, NJ
September 2000 - June 2001: 1835 Hinman, double (with Rich)
September 2001 - June 2002: 1835 Hinman, single
September 2002 - June 2003: Kemper, single
June 2003 - September 2003: Woodmont Ave, Bethesda, MD
September 2003 - June 2004: NMQ, single
July 2004 - August 2004: Sublet at Sherman and Noyes, Evanston
August 2004 - present: Current residence

The sublet, I knew someone who was friends with the subletter, and obviously I got the current one through Drew (although, to be fair to me, he pretty much fell into it as well), so I've literally never had to do anything like this before. It's going to be interesting, but also scary as hell, mostly because I am not very good at dealing with people who know a lot about things that I don't know as much about. I mean, I know how much I can afford to pay, or at least how much they say you're supposed to be able to afford - 30% of your salary, or 35% if utilities are included! - and I also know how much I want to spend (no more than I'm spending now, and ideally less so I can start saving again, though that won't be easy). And I also know what areas I'm looking at. So at least it's a start. There's already a couple places on the radar screen, although there are a number of variables up in the air right now.

Really this will probably be good for me - I've spent most of my life post-high-school generally managing to avoid making adult decisions, but I mean, I'm 25. I think it's time to realize that I can't keep relying on other people to do things for me. You'd think I'd know this already - I pay the bills, I work, etc. - but it takes a while to sink in. Having to fully commit to an apartment search and move is just another step towards figuring it all out.

What self-respecting classic rock station would play Gordon Lightfoot?

On Saturday, I was in the car when the Drive - WDRV, 97.1 FM, the classic rock station out here - played Loverboy's "Working for the Weekend." Now, I have no specific objection to the song itself, but... classic rock? This is right up there with WCBS in New York starting to play disco alongside the traditional "oldies." (The title of the post is an approximation of a quote from my dad upon hearing a Lightfoot song [possibly "If You Could Read My Mind"] on Philadelphia's ostensible classic rock station some time in the late 90s.)

I had my first exam for Intro to Psychology tonight; pretty sure I rocked it, unless the professor is the hardest grader known to man. 55 points available, so that multiplies out to 110 - meaning that if I did as well as I think I did, an A+ is not out of the question. I should probably avoid getting ahead of myself here, but the point is I'm happy with how it went. Gotta get those As.

They're wafer thin!

I bought Girl Scout cookies from a coworker whose daughter is in the Scouts, and they arrived today. Three boxes of Samoas, one of Tagalongs - which went right into the freezer - and one of Thin Mints. I remember when Samoas were changed over to Caramel Delites and how disappointed I was - but oddly, both cookies actually still exist. I thought it was some sort of PC thing, but apparently it's just two different bakeries. Why they need two different ones, I'm not sure. Anyway, Samoas are the superior cookie. They're darker in color, so you get a bit of a richer flavor off the caramel, and also the supporting cookie is white rather than yellow and a bit hardier against the teeth. Yes, I just wrote about Girl Scout cookies like they were wine.

I'm going to try and eat them over as long a period as possible, because Girl Scout cookies are just hideously bad for you. I had a theory that they only sold them once a year because if they were available year-round, people would start thinking about just how ridiculously awful they were from a health standpoint. I mean, you get 15 Samoas per box - more than a quarter per cookie these days, not that it's not worth it - which is five per section inside the box. If you eat one section, that's your saturated fat for the day. You're done. I mean, that's coconut for you, but ye gods. Tagalongs aren't a whole lot better. Is it fair that things which taste so good should be so bad for you? I know that's how it usually works, but I say no.

One thing that I will definitely need to do if I'm going to eat a lot of cookies is get back to the gym. It's been a while (and I've been paying the fat tax in the meantime, figuring I would get back soon), mostly because I've had various acid reflux issues, a problem which I seem to recall noticing at the gym in the first place. I was hoping to see if I could get the problem fixed before I went back, but I just don't think I can hold out much longer; also, losing weight is supposed to help relieve heartburn by taking pressure off that whole area, so it could be a case of killing two birds with one stone if I can really get serious about it. Alma has switched onto a schedule for spring quarter where she really won't be down in Chicago at all during the week, so that may enable me to put Monday and Wednesday towards the gym, though of course that gives me no nights to relax during the week. But then, that's why there are weekends, right? Besides, I've spent most of the past eight years relaxing every night during the week, and look where it got me. (I should clarify the above - I'm not trying to imply that Alma was in any way a cause of me not going to the gym, merely that she was often down here on Monday nights and so I was seeing her on those nights rather than doing anything else, not that I would have preferred to do anything else.)

Anyway. I'm going in to bed "early" here, since I have my first exam tomorrow. It's a lot of stuff to remember, so wish me luck.